Superhero Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY CHRIS NICKSON

  CREDITS

  Copyright Page

  FOR JUNIOR

  Every time I sit to type,

  you are there.

  INTRODUCTION

  Christopher Reeve might have portrayed Superman in the movies, but no one had thought he might really be a superman himself. Until July 1995, that is, when he was thrown by his horse and left completely paralyzed.

  For many people, that would have been the end. They’d have simply given up. For Reeve it was a new beginning, an accident that really did transform him into a superman.

  To many Americans—indeed, to people around the world—he’s become as symbolic in his wheelchair as he ever was in a cape. He’s refused to let his disability stop him; in many ways, it’s offered him a more complete and fulfilling life.

  But he’s always been someone driven to excel, to be the best at anything he’s attempted. That’s been the case from boyhood on; whether academically, as an actor, or in sports, he’s always been compelled to go one step further, to push himself and expand his own limits, even if it’s involved danger. So it’s entirely in character that he should come to view this as another challenge to be overcome.

  In the public eye, he would, and probably always will, be associated with one role: Christopher Reeve was Superman, the actor who’d proved to be the perfect embodiment of the superhero, who’d helped drag movies into the modern blockbuster age.

  But that was as much myth as anything to be found between the covers of a comic book. The role had transformed him into a star, that much was true, but in terms of an acting career it had worked against him. It was a success he had to work very hard to live down.

  By the time he was offered the part he’d already been acting professionally for a decade. The money might not have been remarkable, and his name was hardly on the tip of every tongue, but he’d learned his craft and proved himself to be very talented at it. The leading role in a big-budget film, especially one which dealt with such an archetypal American icon, was too tempting to refuse.

  However fortunate it was at the time, it would become a millstone around his neck. For someone who saw himself as an actor, a person whose business was to transform himself into other people, typecasting was a terrible fate. The opportunities were there to become a major screen figure, but that held little interest for Chris. He wanted to do what he knew, what he loved—act. He wanted parts that were interesting, that would offer a challenge.

  Challenge was what he wanted in most aspects of his life. In appearance, on the surface, he seemed perfectly conventional. He dressed like the preppy he really was, having gone to good private schools, Cornell, and Juilliard. But inside there were turbulent forces at work. Extreme could almost have been his watchword. From the time he was able to afford one, he’d owned his own plane, piloting himself around the country, around the globe. Skiing, cycling, horse riding. He thrived on pushing himself. Had he not been that way, there’d have been no accident. Nor would there have been Christopher Reeve.

  Prior to falling from his horse, Eastern Express, on that day at Commonwealth Park in Virginia, Chris had slowly been reestablishing himself as a film actor, turning around a career that had seemed in terminal decline. But coming back so rapidly, and so strongly—even if he was still in a wheelchair, unable to move more than his head—somehow lent him a new stature and a measure of gravitas.

  He’s undertaken his first full directing assignment, the HBO television movie In the Gloaming (Chris had previously directed the second unit on one of the films he’d starred in), and his voice has been heard in any number of settings, whether on the Academy Awards, exhorting filmmakers to create better roles, at the Democratic National Convention in 1996, in hearings regarding medical insurance for Americans, or as a standard-bearer for research into spinal cord injuries.

  This is the mature Christopher Reeve, enjoying the third phase of his life. The desire to do it all would have been there anyway, given his nature, but it’s been heavily bolstered by his wife, Dana Morosini, their son, Will, and Matthew and Alexandra, his children from a former relationship with Gae Exton.

  When he was brought into the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, Chris had been wearing a chain around his neck with a pendant that read just “Faith.” He’d always had faith in himself, and he would need it more than ever. The pendant was passed to Dana, who wore it along with his wedding ring. It was faith that bound them, and faith that would keep them moving along. And it’s faith in life that’s kept Chris pushing ever since.

  In Superman: The Movie it was easy to suspend disbelief, to think that Chris really could save the world, turn back time, spend years in his Fortress of Solitude taking in the knowledge of the universe. It was easy to see in Chris’s characterization the strong streak of decency that was a part of his natural makeup.

  He touched people then, and if, when the lights went up, they knew it was just a movie, many of them wanted to believe in the idea of Chris as a superman.

  In the time since his accident, that’s the chance he’s given them. His courage and determination have made him into everything the comic-book Superman ever was, someone who refuses to accept limitations, who by his own behavior and standards has become an example and role model for others.

  CHAPTER ONE

  America remains a young enough country that many of its citizens feel the need for a sense of history, a background and identity, the knowledge of where their ancestors came from before appearing on these shores.

  It’s a connection to the past the United States alone can’t offer. Most often genealogical research confirms that emigration was the only chance a family had to evade poverty, starvation, or some other type of cruel death. The poor, tired, hungry, and the huddled masses have found welcoming arms in America for more than two centuries, even if the barriers are now starting to rise.

  For some, however, the past reveals surprising amounts of wealth and power. Christopher Reeve is one of those people. His bearing and patrician good looks seem to indicate a moneyed background—which he had—but it’s hardly nouveau riche. The privilege dates back generations.

  On his father’s side, Chris can trace the lineage all the way to thirteenth-century France, where the D’Olier family was nobility, appointed to any number of lucrative offices by the kings. Inevitably, the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century made a number of changes. Many of the hereditary aristocracy lost their lives. Most others lost their titles, wealth, and land. Even those who clung on didn’t have an easy time.

  Chris’s great-great-great-grandfather, Michel D’Olier, was born in France after the Revolution, after the Napoleonic Wars that left the country much poorer and looking for a way to climb into the nineteenth century under the Bourbon kings. As a young man he met an Irish girl and moved to her homeland, specifically county Mayo, where his son, William, was born.

  If France after Napoleon had seemed like a shattered place, then Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century must have been like one of Dante’s circles of hell. The blights of the potato crop, the mass evictions by absentee landlords, and the failure of the British government to offer any real help had left the popula
tion decimated, smallholdings in ruins. Anyone who could headed west, to the land of opportunity.

  William D’Olier was among them. Landing in New York with a little money, he made his way to Philadelphia. He was better off than many of the new immigrants, with some money and some skill, which he invested wisely to start the first of his cotton mills. Soon there were more, a small empire, which would bring him riches, and his heirs power.

  Money bought him position in a society where the dollar was king. And it helped his children. William’s son, Franklin D’Olier, became the president of Prudential Insurance during the Second World War (as well as one of the founders, and the first commander, of the American Legion).

  Franklin D’Olier Reeve was Franklin’s grandson, born in the family home in Philadelphia in 1928, before his parents settled in the wealthy area of Morristown, New Jersey.

  Sometimes the children of fortune find themselves hating all that’s been given to them on a silver platter. And that seemed to be the case of Franklin Reeve.

  “He reacted against all the privilege by cutting himself off from it,” Chris explained.

  However, he wasn’t completely without options. An extremely gifted student, by the time he parted ways from his family he already had a place at Princeton and knew that the ascetic, hermetic world of academia was where he wanted to make his future. He lived on campus, graduating in 1950 with a B.A. in English.

  Franklin might have turned his back on his immediate family and their money, but that didn’t mean he ignored all his relatives. One who caught his attention was Barbara Pitney Lamb, a distant cousin who had barely begun her own degree course at Vassar. In 1950, just after Franklin’s graduation, they married and moved to Manhattan, where Franklin was set to begin work toward his doctorate at Columbia University.

  He quickly made his name as a star student, clambering up the steps of the ivory tower. His degree might have been in English, but his real passion was Slavic, and particularly Russian, literature—hardly a field which would make him rich.

  Certainly being a graduate student didn’t help his bank balance, so, as well as attending school, Franklin took a variety of jobs to help support himself and Barbara—jobs that had more to do with the working than the thinking classes, as a longshoreman, a waiter, even an actor. (His political leanings were to the left, although in the early 1950s—the era of McCarthy and the HUAC hearings—that wasn’t something anyone wanted to advertise.) Even living on the Upper East Side, a fairly inexpensive neighborhood in those days, making ends meet was difficult.

  Barbara did what she could, penning some freelance journalism. But it wasn’t too long before she had other things on her mind, discovering at the beginning of 1952 that she was pregnant.

  On September 25, she presented Franklin with a son, whom they named Christopher. He was a sweet-looking boy, born with a shock of blond hair, and eyes that gradually turned blue. It spoke volumes about Franklin’s academic aspirations that he asked Frank Kermode, the British scholar and writer, to be the boy’s godfather.

  Within a year the couple had added another child, Benjamin. For Franklin, pressured both to support his rapidly growing family and achieve his own goals, it was a difficult time. Neither was it easy for Barbara. She was just twenty, suddenly forced to squeeze every dollar and be responsible for two babies—a shock to someone who’d grown up, if not rich, then at least in very comfortable circumstances.

  Inevitably, finances put strains on the marriage, which wasn’t proving to be the strongest of bonds, anyway. For almost three more years the family managed to limp along from paycheck to paycheck, things gradually worsening.

  The storms around them brought Chris and Ben close together. With circumstances at home so straitened, the way to lose themselves was in their imagination. Anything was grist for the mill, even boxes that had held groceries.

  “To us they became ships,” Chris recalled years later, “simply because we said they were.”

  It was impossible for the boys not to notice the way things were going between their parents. It reached a head when Chris was three, and the Reeves filed for divorce.

  In the fifties most couples stayed together, even in the bleakest marital situations, “for the sake of the children.” But Franklin and Barbara’s union had broken down to the point where that was impossible, where hatred seemed to replace everything else, and anything was fair game to get an advantage over the other party—even using the children.

  The effect on the boys was to send them even further inside themselves, to make them small, independent beings in their own minds.

  “My father and mother were always fighting over me,” Chris explained, “and therefore canceled each other out. Consequently, I grew up not wanting to depend on them or anybody else. That’s probably the key to my personality.”

  On New Year’s Eve, 1956, Barbara left New York and moved back to her hometown of Princeton with the kids. While they lived with her, Franklin had visitation rights, which he exercised to the letter, making sure to drop the boys off close to—but not at—their mother’s house. He wanted no personal contact with his ex-wife. They were pawns in what would be an almost fifteen-year war of silence and attrition between Franklin and Barbara.

  “I felt torn between them,” Chris would say in 1980. “They had a tendency to use me as a chess piece.”

  In the college town, the asthmatic Barbara managed to keep body and soul together for the family by continuing the journalism she’d begun in New York, this time working for the local paper, Town Topics, eventually becoming an editor.

  It was difficult; financially things were even tighter than when she’d been with Franklin, but at least she was free to be herself again. The real casualties were the children, with Chris in particular “a solemn child,” paying the price for her freedom.

  Franklin had remarried, and was still living in New York, slowly working his way up the academic ladder. He would go on to have a career even more distinguished in its own way than his son’s. He’d teach creative writing at Yale, then Slavic languages at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University, publishing a number of novels, twelve books of poetry, and several volumes of literary criticism. He was, Chris admitted, a remarkable man, who could “do everything—from playing Parcheesi to translating Dostoyevsky.”

  But Franklin’s world was completely circumscribed by the boundaries of the campus and the ivory tower. He knew nothing of popular culture, or the everyday world, and didn’t care to know. To a young boy whose world was changing every day, and who only saw his father on the weekends, that must have made him seem distant, possibly even cold.

  For Christopher and Benjamin life had quickly become complex. But it was about to become even more so. In Princeton Barbara began dating a stockbroker, Tristam Johnson, and in 1959, Barbara Pitney Lamb became Barbara Johnson.

  Johnson had done well for himself, managing brokerage houses, and for the first time in their lives, the boys found themselves living with money—not only was there was no need to watch every cent, but they were surrounded by material things.

  But with this luxury came a new strangeness—two younger stepbrothers, Mark and Brock, Johnson’s kids—a ready-made family. (And a family of high achievers, at that: Mark is now an architect, and Brock a classicist, having studied at Yale. Allison, the daughter Barbara and Tristam would have later, has become a doctor.)

  Johnson was a generous, open man, almost the opposite of the emotionally hermetic Franklin. He’d grown up in the privileged WASP traditions, and wanted—and could afford—the best for his family. But one thing he refused to allow in the house on exclusive Campleton Circle was television, which he called “the boob tube.” Certainly Chris took much of the Waspish style that has always been his trademark from his stepfather. The household offered stability for Chris and Ben after the seesawing of the last few years, an atmosphere of love and laughter, of weekends away in winter, learning to ski in the Poconos, and summers on Cape Cod.

  But the
past had left its mark on the boys, most certainly on Chris. The patterns had already been set, not only for independence, but also in the need to excel, to be the very best at anything he undertook—a way of pleasing and getting the attention of Franklin, because he simply couldn’t understand the emotional distance his real father put between them. Without a doubt, Chris put his father on a pedestal. The man had achieved a great deal, and done it all on his own abilities. The only way his son could live up to that was to be the best at anything and everything he undertook, whatever the price. When Chris was a teenager, his father taught him to sail—a passion that would remain with him—and soon had him skippering boats.

  “I would win a lot,” Chris remembered. “But it was at a certain cost. I would terrorize my crew. I was really aggressive, demanding, and critical of myself and other people. If I didn’t win, it would set me back for days.”

  Johnson might have been only their stepfather, but he treated Chris and Ben just like his own kids, enrolling them in Princeton Day School, exclusive and private, where they’d be guaranteed the best education and a chance to fulfill their potential (something Ben would begin to do when he was thirteen, inventing a new computer language that would be used at Princeton University). Tests quickly established that Chris was a very bright kid, and it was even suggested that he skip a grade, until an astute school psychologist realized that putting him in a situation where he couldn’t excel might be emotionally damaging to Chris, which would likely have been true.

  He was musically gifted, a soprano until his voice broke, singing with the madrigal group at school. And he’d shown an early talent for the piano, which had been encouraged and enhanced by lessons. In fact, it had become a great solace to him, something he could do on his own, alone, sitting there and losing himself in the compositions, with Ravel and Debussy—notably, both quite contemplative—as his favorites. (He’d go on to become an assistant conductor of the school orchestra.)